A quote from a paper by Robert Plomin (2011)
Despite the slow progress towards identifying specific sources of non-shared environment, the basic finding of the 1987 paper remains unchallenged: children growing up in the same family are very different. It is rare in a field as complex as the behavioural sciences to discover such clear and consistent evidence for a finding that radically alters the way we think about an issue as basic as how the environment influences development. It was reasonable to assume that the key influences on children’s development are those that are shared by children growing up in the same family: their parents’ personality and family experiences, the quality of their parents’ marital relationship, their parents’ educational background and socioeconomic status, the neighbourhood in which they are raised and their parents’ attitude to school or to discipline. Yet to the extent that these influences are shared environmentally, they cannot account for individual differences in children’s development because the salient environmental influences are non-shared. The message is not that family experiences are unimportant but rather that the relevant experiences are specific to each child in the family, not general to all children in the family. However, my main conclusion has to be that the key question largely remains unanswered: why are children in the same family so different?Something to remember. I may bring it up later.
